Then & Now | The trees and plants in Hong Kong left over from post-war squatter settlements, when 1.5 million fled China’s civil war and Communist takeover

Between 1946 and 1952 – the Chinese civil war having resumed with full ferocity after the temporary pause that the Sino-Japanese war had allowed – more than a million and a half people decamped to Hong Kong, just before China’s emergent surveillance-police state became efficient enough to restrict internal movement.

These mainland Chinese voluntarily chose to make their homes and lives under the supposed oppressions and miseries found in a desperately overcrowded, resource-poor British colony. In direct consequence of this sudden population influx, sprawling squatter settlements became a fact of Hong Kong life, and remained so for more than 40 years.

What happened to these areas – from when the first large-scale squatter resettlement efforts were undertaken in the early 1950s to the construction of public housing developments such as Oi Man at Ho Man Tin in the 1960s and 70s, with integrated public transport, wet markets, medical clinics and schools – are well-documented aspects of local life.

From scholarly monographs on squatter resettlement and public-housing policies to popularly oriented, well-illustrated local histories, along with oral histories and memoirs in both Chinese and English, Hong Kong’s socio-economic evolution in the post-war era can be seen through these distinctive areas.

Some fragmentary evidence of earlier times remains in areas where now-demolished squatter settlements were not subsequently redeveloped into public housing estates.

Hidden among long grass and undergrowth, concrete floor slabs – left behind when the rest of the structure was torn down – tell their own silent stories.